Can You Start a Successful Tech Career Later in Life?

On Friday afternoon, Paul Graham, a founder of the Silicon Valley investment firm and startup “accelerator” Y Combinator, took to his Web site to defend himself against recent accusations that he is biased against female founders of tech companies. The controversy arose from an interview published in late December at the Information, a new tech-news Web site, in which Graham suggested that women were underrepresented in his portfolio of companies because “they haven’t been hacking for the past ten years.” He went on, “If you go look at the bios of successful founders … they were all hacking on computers at age thirteen.” With these comments, Graham apparently dismissed the chances of tech-industry success for anyone who failed to begin their career pursuits in adolescence, female or not.

Graham’s comments attracted a considerable amount of attention and, in some quarters, scorn: at Gawker’s Valleywag blog, Nitasha Tiku called it “the clearest picture of Silicon Valley’s unacknowledged sexism to ever find its way in print.” At the Wire, Connor Simpson wrote that Graham had “said some dumb stuff about women.”

In his latest post, Graham makes clear that Y Combinator strives to increase the number of female founders among its portfolio companies. In fact, Graham argues, Y Combinator has always advocated for greater inclusion in the tech industry. “The people who caricature us as being only interested in funding young hotshots forget that when we started, in 2005, young founders were not a privileged group but a marginalized one,” he wrote. “The fact that young founders seem a privileged group now is partly due to our efforts.”

Today, the idea that programming is primarily for the young has become so ingrained in Silicon Valley culture that there is a movement to teach programming skills to adults and to encourage them to pursue tech careers. The movement has arisen partly in response to a concern over the shortage of excellent science, technology, engineering, and math students in the United States. Proponents of such programs believe that because some people, women among them, may have been inadequately exposed to tech at a young age, it might not be a bad idea to provide tech-training resources to people above the age of, say, thirteen.

Tech companies don’t require their engineers to be coding wunderkinds, but most of them require a computer-science degree. At Google and elsewhere, the résumés of candidates with atypical profiles can easily get passed over. (Google, in fact, only recently abandoned the use of grade-point averages and test scores to screen job candidates.) Sheeroy Desai, the C.E.O. of Gild, which makes software to help companies identify tech talent, attributes this both to bias and to the need to efficiently screen huge numbers of candidates. “In the majority of cases, companies are looking for traditional markers,” he told me.

Given that tech companies and investors are generally accustomed to people who fit the mold of Larry Page or Mark Zuckerberg, are the graduates of training programs for adults destined to be seen as second-rate hackers? Not necessarily. In a post clarifying his remarks to the Information, Graham wrote, “In fact I err on the side of late binding for everything, including métiers. What I was talking about here is the idea that to do something well you have to be interested in it for its own sake, not just because you had to pick something as a major.” And a few companies, including Gild, are seeking to widen the pool of tech prospects by helping evaluate non-traditional credentials, such as contributions to open-source software projects.

If more companies become willing to consider alternate recruitment pipelines, new entries to the tech field may start getting better access to employment opportunities. General Assembly, which has campuses in nine cities worldwide, offers an intensive twelve-week course in Web development; after completing the program, students are matched with tech companies looking for talent. Some four thousand students have completed General Assembly’s classes, and most of them have found jobs in the industry, according to Jake Schwartz, the company’s C.E.O. One student, Adam McCabe, a former New York City schoolteacher, had never written a line of code when he began a General Assembly course in August. Two months after completing the program, a startup offered him a job.

Whether these newly minted programmers can gain credibility as founders is another matter, however. Y Combinator and other investors are not just seeking people who can code. They value long-time hackers who, according to Graham, tend to have special insight that others may lack. “Mark Zuckerberg starts programming, starts messing about with computers when he’s like ten, or whatever,” he told the Information. “By the time he’s starting Facebook, he’s a hacker, and so he looks at the world through hacker eyes.”

Indeed, the most successful tech companies—such as Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Intel—have founders with extensive technical backgrounds. The trend continues with newer companies. In a post on TechCrunch, Aileen Lee, of the venture firm Cowboy Ventures, analyzed thirty-nine companies founded between 2003 and 2013 with billion-dollar valuations; only two of the companies’ founders lacked prior experience in tech. Even founders considered to be less technical, such as Steve Jobs, Reid Hoffman, and Jeff Bezos, were exposed to programming relatively early in life. Dennis Crowley, of Foursquare, who taught himself some basic tech skills to build the prototype for his first company, Dodgeball, is an outlier.

The past doesn’t always predict the future, though. Some evidence suggests that extensive programming knowledge may, in fact, be increasingly less necessary for startup founders. Tools such as Amazon Web Services have commodified certain aspects of software development. Traditional markers of innovation, such as novel algorithms or patents, are no longer critical factors in a company’s success, said Marc Hedlund, the vice-president of engineering at Stripe, a payment-processing company. “Twitter is a huge public company, but it was not based on a great tech implementation,” he told me. “The tech around it grew up over time.” Graham, in fact, made similar observations in his interview with the Information. “You don’t have to be a hardcore hacker to start a startup like you might have had to be twenty years ago,” he said.

Still, the hardcore hacker remains a widely preferred standard for founders and employees in tech companies, said Laura Weidman Powers, the executive director of CODE2040, an organization that encourages minorities to pursue tech careers. CODE2040 runs a summer program that places college students in internships with tech companies, including mentoring and networking with Silicon Valley executives and investors. Weidman Powers found that many in the industry initially perceived students who began programming in college as less serious about the field. “There’s a conflation of passion with exposure,” she told me. “There are plenty of people who didn’t have the chance to experience tech until later, but when they discover it they unearth a deep passion for it.”

Weidman Powers believes that the bias against latecomers to tech will fade as companies and investors are exposed to programmers from a variety of backgrounds. “I think that barrier falls away in the face of the right connections,” she told me. But it remains unclear whether basic courses in code, such as General Assembly’s, can informally provide the networking connections that CODE2040 is attempting to forge. Schwartz, for his part, believes General Assembly’s courses are as much a community-building tool as a vocational one. “In 2015, we’ll have forty thousand alumni of our long-form courses,” he told me. “It’s going to be an interesting, powerful, dynamic network—even greater than Harvard Business School.”